Prepare and Optimize eCommerce Website for Omnichannel Marketing

The new year is here, and e-commerce is changing fast. Rewinding 2020 isn’t an option, so let’s make sure your website is optimized for the coming year. Read this article to find tips on security, personalization, and effective omnichannel marketing.

Table of contents

How did your website handle 2020?
Website Hosting, Security, & Performance Optimization
Don’t pay for an ad until your website conversion rate doubles
Personalization Quick Tips
Tying It All Together

How did your website handle 2020?

With 2020 behind us, it’s time to take a breather, settle in, and prepare for the new year. Our miniguide with JetRails, Bolt, and 121ecommerce contains the fast-facts of how to prepare for the new year. Whether you need to improve revenue, the website experience, your contact lists, or integrate new features, we have you covered.

Website Hosting, Security, & Performance Optimization

If your website hosting isn’t tailored to your eCommerce needs, you’re chasing away shoppers for no good reason. You’re also exposing your brand to security breaches and compliance risks. Shoppers expect your site to operate like clockwork. Now’s your chance to make sure that it does!

Speed

According to Google, a simple increase in page loading speed from 1 second to a mere 5 seconds will increase your bounce rate by a whopping 90%. Google has also proven that 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. While your web host will often have the greatest impact on your webpage speeds, don’t forget that your web developers and your choices of extensions, apps, and integrations will all play a role as well.

Scalability

If your site had a hard time keeping up with bursts of shoppers at any time in 2020, or if you’re expecting even more traffic in 2021, it’s extremely important to load and test your website. Load testing allows you to see how your website will hold up to a surge in traffic, identifying bottlenecks within your hosting and your website coding, which you can then address proactively. Additionally, now is a great time to think about an elastic autoscaling environment for your website and for any additional applications that you’re hosting.

Monitoring

If you aren’t monitoring the security and uptime of your site as well as any errors that are being displayed to shoppers, you’re leaving your store unattended. Ideally, you should have a web host that’s focused on the mission-critical nature of eCommerce sites and assists with a range of monitoring. This should include monitoring uptime, loading speeds, resource usage, malware scanners, intrusion detection systems, web application firewalls, and more. Without proper monitoring, your site could be facing long-term challenges, and you wouldn’t know it.

Don’t pay for an ad until your website conversion rate doubles

Capture and Own Your Data

Your website visitors leave behind a tremendous amount of data, much of it easily accessible. Many companies – not just Amazon, Alibaba, or eBay – are taking advantage of it to learn more about their visitors and uncover valuable insights like who their visitors are, what they’re interested in, and creating custom profiles for each shopper. Fortunately, you don’t need a data scientist on your marketing team to start doing this. Gather and analyze visitor data in a few easy steps with Justuno to uncover extremely valuable information. You might have an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), but there’s also your Actual Customer Profile (ACP) – discover who your customers are and where they’re coming from so you can appropriately target them both on and off-site.

Post-Holiday List Segmentation & Marketing

Take advantage of the new contacts you collected during the holiday shopping season. Understand who they are by analyzing data like their purchases, gender, product preferences, and location to refine your contact list. Use those segments for post-holiday marketing campaigns to continue the relationship like asking for reviews. Reward reviews and testimonials with discounts or free samples to encourage a second purchase. Even if they bought your product as a gift, you can still ask for their testimonial!. (What did they like about it? Would they buy it again or interested in buying one for themselves now?) Be creative with the postpurchase engagement!

Capitalize on Accessible Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn’t exclusive to big fancy tech companies or bigger brands – it’s more accessible now than ever. Companies of every size are using AI and machine learning to personalize their website experience and improve conversions across the board. From optimizing your lead capture to personalizing upsells and cross-sells by behavior and gift drawers. Effective brands are using this to improve their entire site – and it’s not too late to start.

Deploy AI on your site with Justuno’s Commerce AI – quick and simple to install. Personalized, automatic product recommendations you can drop anywhere on your site (replacing HTML) or in a pop-up. Commerce AI comes with a dedicated account strategist to boot so you can get strategy insight from a pro.

Personalization Quick Tips

According to Google, 85% of consumers are more likely to shop from brands that offer highly personalized experiences. While there isn’t a silver-bullet solution, there are 7 tactics that you can deploy to build the foundation of a successful personalization program.

Localization: adjust your site language and checkout experience to accommodate for regional dialects, payment preferences, and currency designation.

Progressive Profiling: leverage chatbots and well-timed surveys to enrich prospect data originally captured during a shopper’s first interaction.

Personalize the Checkout Experience: Give shoppers a one-click checkout experience on any site in the same checkout network — even if they’ve never shopped with you before.

Retargeting and Time-Sensitive Promotions: make use of cookies and behavioral data to automatically retarget and send cart abandonment emails to users who have shown interest in your products.

Dynamic Discounting With Loyalty Programs: Set up smart rules to automatically convert loyalty points to coupons and discounts for products your customers already love.

Personalized Web Experiences: Segment your shoppers using demographic and behavioral traits, then run multivariate tests on elements including the page color, product ratings, image dimensions, and font size…etc.

Cross-Selling: offer shoppers complimentary (and relevant) products on the product/cart page and during the checkout to increase AOV and LTV.

Tying It All Together

Now that you know what you need in terms of hosting, a personalized shopping experience, and frontend changes, you’re all set, right? Not so fast. What’s missing? A solution partner to execute your plan and connect all the moving parts under one eCommerce roof. Still not convinced? Here are three reasons to choose a solution partner rather than going handling your eCommerce development as a DIY project:

Minimize Your Risk

In Q3 of 2020, eCommerce sales increased a whopping 37%. With so many more people shopping online due to the global pandemic, the time is ripe for hackers, and keeping your website and your customer’s data safe and secure is crucial. Having a solution partner at your side can help you choose credible extensions or plugins, keep your website updated with the latest security updates and ensure your code is airtight. They can even help you choose the right eCommerce platform.

Get Up and Running Quicker

Your solution partner should have years of experience working on your particular platform. They’ve seen what slows down a project and what brings it to launch quicker. This experience will be critical to getting you to the finish line asap. Because in the world of website development, you shouldn’t focus on launching a perfect site. Your focus should be on launching a revenue-producing site. And as soon as your partner says you’re ready…you’re ready. Trust them. Because when it comes to eCommerce, “done is better than perfect.”

Save Money on Development Costs

Bug fixes, security updates, platform upgrades, extension installations, third-party integrations, custom development. You may need all these as an eCommerce merchant. And the costs can add up quickly. Instead of spending your precious time searching for developers whose skills are questionable, it’s in your best interest to hire a partner with a team of developers from the start that can help you minimize these costs and expedite your timeline.

Source: Justuno